Ben Phillips is Campaigns and Policy Director of ActionAid. He has lived and worked in four continents and 10 cities including New Delhi and Washington DC, as well as with children in poverty in East London. He began his development work at the grassroots, as a teacher and ANC activist living in Mamelodi township, South Africa, in 1994, just after the end of apartheid.

Entries by Ben Phillips

Those corporate scandals just keep coming. The torrent won't stop. Yesterday a tech company, today a bank, tomorrow a mining corporation, and the following day an oil firm. Even corporations are acknowledging that it's all gone badly wrong. They talk of having let people down, even of moral failure. They...

Black clouds churning from coal power plants and smelly car exhausts may be the main images that spring to mind when thinking about the perpetrators of climate change - and rightly so. But hidden behind the thick smoke, the food industry is also making the problem worse because it emits...

When the world's governments meet at a special session of the UN this week to take stock of toward the Millennium Development Goals and negotiating a blueprint for global development, our message to them will be that only by confronting inequality head-on will poverty be overcome.

When you sit down with people who have been forcibly evicted from their land, you can feel full of despair. When you hear mothers talk about how the fence put up by land grabbers prevents them from getting to hospital, or youngsters talk about how their only option for work...

Even though it's January, and it's 2013, it feels like a Victorian Christmas. It's not just because of the beautiful snow, and the laughter of kids throwing snowballs. It's also because Britain is returning to levels of inequality not seen since the time of Dickens. And because of a welfare...